Covid-19 origin: US asks China to release medical records of 9 people

What's the origin of coronavirus? It's a million-dollar question and the Biden administration in the US is keen on knowing its answer. 

President Joe Biden re-ordered a further intelligence investigation into the origins of Covid-19. As Washington's focus has returned to China, the administration is looking for clues on whether the virus has leaked from a laboratory or originated from nature. 

Biden’s top coronavirus adviser Dr Anthony Fauci has called on China to share medical records of nine people, six miners and three researchers, whose symptoms are correlated with Covid-19.

“I would like to see the medical records of the three people who are reported to have got sick in 2019,” Fauci told the Financial Times.

“Did they really get sick, and if so, what did they get sick with?”

Fauci said that the medical records could be used to solve the debates over the origins of the virus which killed nearly 3.7 millions worldwide.

“The same with the miners who got ill years ago . . . What do the medical records of those people say? Was there [a] virus in those people? What was it? It is entirely conceivable that the origins of Sars-Cov-2 was in that cave and either started spreading naturally or went through the lab,” he added.

A group of scientists from the World Health Organization(WHO) and China have published results of the study on the origins of Covid-19 in March saying that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and “a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely.”

However, the findings offer little new insight into how the virus first emerged and leave many questions unanswered. 

In conclusion, the joint investigation team called for “a continued scientific and collaborative approach to be taken towards tracing the origins of Covid-19.”

Washington has called for the WHO to open a second phase to its investigation on Covid-19's origin.

Although there is no strong evidence that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, a Wall Street Journal article published on May 23 sparked controversies and suspicions again over the possibility of the lab-leak theory.

According to the report, three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology of China became sick in November 2019, according to a US intelligence report.

These three Chinese researchers working in the Wuhan lab had “symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness.”

Furthermore, six Chinese miners fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mine to clear bat guano in April 2012. This incident also raised questions over the origin of the pandemic from the Chinese lab.

In April 2012, six miners here fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mine to clear bat guano. Three of them died.

Former President Donald Trump had called the coronavirus as “Chinese virus” many times, while some White House officials had referred to it as “Kung-Flu.”

On the other hand, a new study reported by the Daily Mail claimed that Chinese scientists created coronavirus in a lab and then tried to conceal it by "reverse engineering" variants of the deadly virus to make it appear as if it developed from bats.

The article also notes the silencing of scientists in China who spoke out about the virus. 

China repeatedly rejected lab-leak allegations. After Biden’s recent order for the investigation, China’s US embassy said politicising the origins of Covid-19 would hamper further investigations and undermine global efforts to curb the pandemic.

The embassy in Washington said in a statement: "Some political forces have been fixated on political manipulation and (the) blame game."